(2023-07-14) Communal Bonfires

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Communal Bonfires. Online/virtual community platforms are assembly-kits for large, communal bonfires, designed to draw people towards the light and into the warm togetherness of community

Riffing on thoughts about healthy information consumption, Tom Critchlow described his personal campfire thusly: https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/. ((2018-10-11) Critchlow Of Digital Streams Campfires And Gardens)

Live Chat has its limits though. For information to be synthesized into knowledge, the rate of messaging needs to be slowed down to make room for less reactive, more deliberate, long-form expression.

threaded discussion Forums, with their boards and threaded messages, serve this function. The bonfire's contribution to the digital garden happens through threads, aka topics. Specifically, threads with hyperlinks, so they can point to one another. That’s the essence of it

Five years at Discourse taught me a lot about the interplay between 'chatrooms' and 'forums' as two different modes of conversation.

chat and forum communities can complement one another beautifully

Both modes are required for good conversation to arise and thrive.

My last stint at Discourse was an attempt to merge the two modes together, with the introduction of Discourse Chat.

the direction I wanted to go from there was understandably incompatible with the Discourse project's DNA as a traditional forum: I proposed we make chat the lead of our community experience. Community begins in the chat rooms, I thought. Discourse thought not, so we amicably parted ways.

Discord, ruler of our community lands, now supports a variety of threads & boards features that fit neatly into the forum paradigm.

Discord today is equal parts group chat and forum. I wish I could say “problem solved!”, but there are some critical failures in Discord's makeup.

• Discord is not web-readable and thus only minimally linkable
• Discord mixes different thread concepts (chat-channel threads vs forum-channel threads) instead of building a unified forum interface for threads as a progressive information artifact that can evolve from simple to complex in a lossless manner
• Discord's finances are dubious

If Discord isn't the answer, what is?

The Contenders: Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Discourse, Zulip, Linen

But Discord is the superior community platform by being the one thing these other alternatives are not: A network.

When Discord inevitably implodes, there's only one clear contender for migrants in search of an open messaging network: Matrix.org, “an open network for secure, decentralised communication”.

it's also encrypted by default and thus signs everything, which facilitates socialized proof of work.

having been made by people who care first and foremost about how messages are sent (securely, reliably, quickly etc.), there are gaps to be filled by people who care instead about how messages are written, displayed and organized as part of an ever-evolving knowledge mosaic.

our capacity for pro-social change can be measured in how freely we may exchange messages with one another.

Evolutionary Communication Protocols

Messages are living information artifacts. As content blobs they can morph through many different forms, from ephemeral musings to everlasting tomes of shared understandings.

Today we're pre-releasing Commune, our first foundational step towards a community platform built specifically for alignment with digital gardens

It currently exists as two different but complementary entities:

Commune app

built on top of the Matrix protocol. The app consists of a server-backend and a client-frontend.

While in v0.x_pre-alpha it is essentially Linen (or Discourse Bot Kit), but for Matrix instead of Discord/Slack. Hook your existing Matrix instances up with Commune to give your channels web-public threading superpowers.

The app aims to eventually reach relative feature parity (not symmetry) with Discord as well as Reddit, by building on top of the Matrix and ActivityPub protocols. Commune is protocol-first software.

Easy self-hosting is a top priority, but can only happen downstream of improvements to Matrix (and to a lesser extent, ActivityPub) server software like Synapse and Conduit. Until Commune-app is more mature, the recommended way to use it is via Shpong.

Our first flagship instance built with Commune is https://shpong.com

It's a Reddit-like site that operates a network of sub-communities